Rudolf Fritz Weiss: Life and Career (1895–1991)

Rudolf Fritz Weiss lived for ninety-six years, from the Berlin of the German Empire to the last weeks of 1991, and for most of that time he was a physician who took medicinal plants seriously. He was trained as an internist at one of Europe’s great teaching hospitals, he lectured on what he called scientific plant medicine in Berlin from 1931, and he wrote the book that, from its second edition in 1960, carried the title Lehrbuch der Phytotherapie (Textbook of Phytotherapy). Colleagues later called him the founder of modern phytotherapy; one obituary called him the Nestor — the senior elder — of scientifically oriented plant medicine. German sources spell his surname both “Weiss” and “Weiß”; this site uses Weiss, the form on his English books.

This page tells his life in order. It follows the boy who loved botany into Red Cross service in the First World War, through two dissertations and the Charité, to a sanatorium in the Harz mountains and a lecturing post in Berlin. It states plainly what the sources record of the years 1933 to 1945, then follows him into Soviet captivity, where he worked as a camp doctor with plants he gathered himself, and out again in 1952 to a second career in Hannover, at the Freudenstadt congresses, in a forest house in the Allgäu and at the University of Tübingen. His textbook, his method and his place on Germany’s Commission E each have their own page in this wing and are only touched on here.

Table of Contents

  1. A Berlin Boyhood Among Plants
  2. The First World War and the Call to Medicine
  3. Two Dissertations: Medicine and Botany
  4. Internist at the Charité and the Harz Sanatorium
  5. Teaching Plant Medicine in Berlin, 1931–1945
  6. Military Hospital Doctor and Prisoner of War
  7. Camp Doctor in Soviet Captivity
  8. A New Start in Hannover and Freudenstadt
  9. The Forest House at Vogelherd and the Tübingen Years
  10. Honours and Last Years
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. A Berlin Boyhood Among Plants

Rudolf Fritz Weiss was born on 28 July 1895 in Berlin, in the district of Charlottenburg. The German biographical record and the tributes written by his colleagues in the physicians’ naturopathy journal agree on the date; in 2020 the Zeitschrift für Phytotherapie, the journal he founded, marked his 125th birthday with a commemorative piece.

Little is written down about his childhood, but one detail recurs in every account of it: as a boy he was already enthusiastic about medicinal plants and about botany in general. That early interest matters for the rest of the story. Weiss did not come to plants late, as a disillusioned doctor looking for alternatives; he came to medicine as a young man who already knew plants, and he kept both interests side by side for the rest of his life. When, decades later, he wrote that the starting point of plant medicine was knowledge of medicinal plants gained from observing nature, he was describing the way he himself had begun.

The Berlin of his youth was the capital of a country that led the world in academic pharmacology and in the chemistry of plant substances. Alkaloids such as morphine, quinine and atropine had been isolated from plants in the previous century, and the pharmaceutical industry was turning plant chemistry into pure tablets and injections. The distance between a garden plant and a pharmacy drug was widening. Much of Weiss’s later career can be read as an effort to keep the whole plant inside scientific medicine rather than leaving it to folk practice alone.

Back to Table of Contents

2. The First World War and the Call to Medicine

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Weiss was nineteen. German Wikipedia records that he served as a volunteer nurse or orderly with the Red Cross (freiwilliger Krankenpfleger beim Roten Kreuz); a 2005 tribute in the Ärztezeitschrift für Naturheilverfahren puts it more briefly, saying that he took part in the first war as a medical orderly (Sanitäter) and in the second as a doctor.

According to the German biographical account, it was this wartime experience of caring for the sick and wounded that moved him to study medicine. The sources say no more than that, and nothing on this page adds to it. What can be said is that the pattern repeated itself: both world wars put Weiss into military medicine, the first as an orderly and the second as a physician, and the second cost him seven years of his life.

Back to Table of Contents

3. Two Dissertations: Medicine and Botany

After the war Weiss studied medicine at the University of Berlin and, in parallel, botany. He received his licence to practise as a physician (Approbation) in 1922.

He wrote not one doctoral dissertation but two — one in medicine and one in botany. According to German Wikipedia, only the medical one was accepted as his dissertation, in order to save printing costs: these were the years of Germany’s great inflation, when the cost of printing rose from one week to the next.

The medical thesis

His medical dissertation of 1922 was titled Ueber den Einfluss der Syphilis auf Entstehung und Verlauf der Tuberculose — “On the influence of syphilis on the origin and course of tuberculosis.” In the early 1920s tuberculosis was one of the commonest causes of death in Germany, there were no antibiotics against either disease, and how one chronic infection affected another was a live clinical question.

The botanical paper

The botanical work was a study of the plants that grow on the gypsum (calcium sulphate) soils of the southern Harz, a landscape of gypsum cliffs and karst at the southern edge of the Harz mountains in central Germany with a distinctive flora of its own. It was published in the Botanisches Centralblatt; the 2005 tribute gives its title as Die Gipsflora des Harzes (The Gypsum Flora of the Harz). It is a field botanist’s paper, not a medical one, and it shows that he already had the habit of looking at plants where they grow — the habit he later placed at the start of his method.

Back to Table of Contents

4. Internist at the Charité and the Harz Sanatorium

Weiss took his specialist training in internal medicine at the Charité, Berlin’s university hospital, under Professor His — so the 2005 tribute records. This was a conventional, demanding clinical training in one of the leading departments of internal medicine of the period, and it shaped him for good. In everything he later wrote about plants he insisted that the doctor who uses them stands on the ground of clinical medicine.

Early clinical writing

His early publications ranged widely across internal medicine. His colleague K.-Ch. Schimmel lists papers on tuberculosis, diabetes insipidus, psychoneurotic illness, high blood pressure and thyrotoxicosis (an overactive thyroid), and notes that Weiss always treated plant medicine as part of general medicine rather than as a separate system. German Wikipedia lists three books from these years:

The liver cookbook belongs to a precise moment in medical history. In 1926 the American physicians George Minot and William Murphy had reported that patients with pernicious anaemia, until then a fatal disease, recovered on a diet containing large amounts of liver — the work that later earned the 1934 Nobel Prize and led eventually to the discovery of vitamin B12 (see Whipple, Minot and Murphy). Eating that much liver day after day was hard for patients, and a cookbook of ways to prepare it was a practical answer. It is an early sign of something that runs through Weiss’s whole career: an interest in treatment that comes from food and plants, written for the doctor at the bedside.

The sanatorium

After the Charité he took charge of a sanatorium in the Harz — the same region whose gypsum flora he had studied — where, according to German Wikipedia, he was able to work with medicinal plants in practice. No source fetched for this page gives the years of the sanatorium post or the sanatorium’s name, so neither is given here.

Back to Table of Contents

5. Teaching Plant Medicine in Berlin, 1931–1945

From 1931 Weiss was lecturer (Dozent) for scientific plant medicine at the Akademie für ärztliche Fortbildung in Berlin, the academy for the continuing education of practising doctors. German Wikipedia’s article on plant medicine dates the beginning of scientific plant medicine in Germany to this appointment: from 1931, it says, Rudolf Fritz Weiss founded die wissenschaftliche Pflanzenheilkunde. His audience was not students but qualified physicians who came to learn what plant remedies could and could not do. (A 2005 tribute says he taught there even before the First World War; that cannot be right for a man licensed in 1922, and the 1931 date is used here.)

The years 1933 to 1945, as the sources record them

The National Socialist government came to power in January 1933, two years after Weiss began lecturing, and he held the Berlin post through the years that followed. The documented facts of his career in this period are these:

No source consulted for this wing records membership of the National Socialist party, a party office, or any role in the regime’s programme for a “New German Medicine” (Neue Deutsche Heilkunde), and none of them addresses the question to clear him either. A 2009 dissertation on the effects of National Socialist doctrine on homoeopathy and phytotherapy was searched for his name and does not mention him. This page states the positions he held and the book he published, and nothing beyond them.

The 1944 book is the root of everything that followed. From its second edition in 1960 it was retitled Lehrbuch der Phytotherapie, and it went through six editions under Weiss’s own hand. Its story — and his method of combining knowledge of the plant with clinical medicine — is told on the Lehrbuch der Phytotherapie page.

Back to Table of Contents

6. Military Hospital Doctor and Prisoner of War

During the Second World War Weiss served as a reserve medical officer (Sanitätsoffizier der Reserve) at Reserve Military Hospital 124 (Reservelazarett 124), housed in the hospital at Berlin-Britz in the south of the city. According to German Wikipedia he founded a rehabilitation department there and directed its internal-medicine work. A reserve military hospital in the capital treated wounded and sick soldiers sent back from the fronts; an internist in such a post dealt with infections, injuries that had become chronic, and the long recovery of men who would or would not return to service.

At the end of the war Weiss was taken prisoner by the Soviet army. The sources do not say exactly when or where he was captured; they agree that he remained in Russian captivity until 1952 — about seven years, as the 2005 tribute puts it. He was about fifty when the war ended and fifty-six or fifty-seven when he came home.

Back to Table of Contents

7. Camp Doctor in Soviet Captivity

In the prisoner-of-war camps Weiss worked as a camp doctor. With few or no manufactured medicines available, he supplied his fellow prisoners with medicinal plants that he gathered himself. German Wikipedia adds a striking detail: on the instructions of the Soviet authorities he even lectured on plant medicine in the camp near Küstrin, the fortress town on the Oder river at today’s German–Polish border.

It is the one part of his life in which the field botanist and the physician were forced into a single job. The knowledge of where plants grow, gained as a boy and on the gypsum slopes of the Harz, became a way of treating the sick when nothing else was at hand. Heinz Schilcher, who knew him for decades, wrote in his obituary that in later years Weiss told audiences with great enthusiasm about his experiences with plant preparations as a camp doctor in Russian captivity. In 1987 the Federal Republic gave him its Cross of Merit for exactly this work.

“Wir gehen den Weg”

K.-Ch. Schimmel’s 2005 portrait reports that the cruellest part of captivity for Weiss was not the hardship itself but being cut off from books and from any intellectual outlet. It prints a poem Weiss wrote in the camp, “Wir gehen den Weg” (“We walk the path”). Its opening lines read:

Wir gehen den Weg
bei finsterer Nacht.
Wir suchen den Steg
mit allem Bedacht.

In our own translation: “We walk the path / in darkest night. / We seek the bridge / with every care.” Weiss kept writing poems for the rest of his life; a collection, Gedichte am Wege (Poems by the Wayside), appeared in 1985.

Deficiency disease after captivity

Weiss returned to Germany in 1952. Six years later he published a paper in Medizinische on deficiency diseases in recently returned prisoners of war — how the conditions were to be defined, how they were treated, and how they were to be assessed by medical experts. PubMed holds no abstract for it, so its conclusions are not summarised here; its subject alone shows a physician writing about a condition he had seen from both sides of the wire.

Back to Table of Contents

8. A New Start in Hannover and Freudenstadt

Back in West Germany, Weiss settled in practice as a specialist in internal medicine in Hannover. He was then in his late fifties and had to build a practice and a reputation a second time.

The physicians’ naturopathy association

From 1954 he was a member of the Zentralverband der Ärzte für Naturheilverfahren (ZÄN), the central association of German physicians who used naturopathic methods. He was its first chairman from 1959 to 1961, and he led its working group on phytotherapy for more than thirty years. This was a body of licensed doctors, and his place in it fitted his lifelong position: plant medicine as one part of the physician’s training, not a rival to it.

Freudenstadt

The ZÄN held its continuing-education congresses in Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, and Weiss lectured there regularly for half a century. Schilcher and Schimmel both describe him as one of the best-loved speakers, still reporting the newest research at the age of ninety, and remember that the congress audience called him “Papa Weiß”. Schimmel adds that he lectured freely, without a manuscript, into old age.

A stream of review papers

Alongside practice, Weiss wrote. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s he published a long run of review papers, most of them in the journal Hippokrates: on the plant treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (1956), of arteriosclerosis (1957) and of colitis (1957), on the state of the Rauwolfia question (1958), on newer research in phytotherapy (1959 and 1962), on medicinal plants in prevention (1960), on cough teas (1961), on how hawthorn acts (1963), on bitters in present-day therapy (in Planta Medica, 1966), and a survey titled “Phytotherapy today” (1975). In all he wrote more than a hundred original papers and monographs. Among his books for a wider readership were Moderne Pflanzen-Heilkunde (1966), Das große Kneipp-Buch, a book in the tradition of the water-cure priest Sebastian Kneipp, and, as editor in 1974, a continuation of the Swiss pastor Johann Künzle’s Das große Kräuterheilbuch. The plants he wrote about are discussed on the Hawthorn, Valerian and Chamomile page.

Founding the Society for Phytotherapy

In 1971 Weiss was a founding member of the Gesellschaft für Phytotherapie (Society for Phytotherapy) and its chairman from 1971 to 1973; he was later made its honorary president. In 1980 he founded the Zeitschrift für Phytotherapie, bringing in the professors Franz-Christian Czygan of Würzburg and Fritz H. Kemper of Münster as co-editors. From 1978 he also sat on Commission E, the expert committee of the Federal Health Office that evaluated herbal medicines under the 1976 Drug Law, and he remained on it into his last years. That work is the subject of the Commission E and Legacy page.

Back to Table of Contents

9. The Forest House at Vogelherd and the Tübingen Years

When he gave up his practice, Weiss did not stop working. He moved to Aitrach in the Allgäu, in southern Württemberg, to the hamlet of Vogelherd, to carry on his research. In 1985 the weekly Die Zeit sent the writer Claudia Pai to profile him. Her article, headed “Hin und wieder etwas Weißdorn” (“Now and then a little hawthorn”), opens with the journey to Vogelherd, which she calls a three-house village, and quotes Weiss on the telephone worrying that she would have trouble finding him: “ich wohne nämlich mitten im Wald” — “I live, you see, in the middle of the forest.”

Teaching at Tübingen in his late eighties

In 1983 the University of Tübingen gave him a teaching post (Lehrauftrag); German Wikipedia also records a Tübingen teaching commission taken up in 1984, at the age of 88, on “modern phytotherapy in practice” (Neuzeitliche Phytotherapie in der Praxis). In 1985 Lothar Späth, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, named him honorary professor. By then he was close to ninety, and he was teaching medical students the subject he had first taught to practising doctors in Berlin more than half a century before.

The last edition he edited

Weiss edited the sixth German edition of his textbook himself, in 1985. After that Volker Fintelmann took the book over and carried it through later editions. An English translation by A. R. Meuss, titled Herbal Medicine, appeared in 1988, during his lifetime.

Back to Table of Contents

10. Honours and Last Years

Recognition came to Weiss late and in quantity. The honours recorded by German Wikipedia and by Schilcher’s obituary include:

The Society for Phytotherapy also named a prize for him, the Rudolf-Fritz-Weiss-Preis; it was later discontinued and succeeded by today’s Phytotherapie-Preis.

Death at ninety-six

Rudolf Fritz Weiss died on 27 November 1991 in Aitrach, aged ninety-six. (Some booksellers’ notes give 1992; the obituary in the physicians’ naturopathy journal and the German biographical record give 27 November 1991.) Heinz Schilcher, a pharmacist and phytotherapy researcher who had worked beside him on Commission E, wrote the obituary in the Ärztezeitschrift für Naturheilverfahren in 1992. In 1995, for the centenary of his birth, his co-editors Kemper and Czygan wrote an editorial remembering him as the founder of modern phytotherapy, and the Zeitschrift für Phytotherapie reprinted it in 2020 for his 125th birthday.

His life spans almost exactly the century in which plant medicine was pushed to the edge of German academic medicine and then, in part through his teaching, his textbook and his committee work, brought back into it as a subject with its own textbooks, journal, society and regulatory monographs. The successors who carried his approach forward — Fintelmann, Schilcher and Max Wichtl among them — and the way Germany came to regulate herbal medicines are described on the Commission E and Legacy page, and the whole wing begins at the Rudolf Fritz Weiss hub.

Back to Table of Contents

Key Research Papers

  1. Weiss RF. [Deficiency diseases in recently returned POW's; definition of concepts, treatment & expert evaluation]. Medizinische. 1958;41:1610-6. PubMed PMID: 13599906
  2. Weiss RF. [Phytotherapy of rheumatoid arthritis]. Hippokrates. 1956;27(21):685-8. PubMed PMID: 13384924
  3. Weiss RF. [Contributions to phytotherapy. VII. Phytotherapy of arteriosclerosis]. Hippokrates. 1957;28(8):247-51. PubMed PMID: 13428239
  4. Weiss RF. [Phytotherapy in colitis]. Hippokrates. 1957;28(11):348-51. PubMed PMID: 13448614
  5. Weiss RF. [The present status of the Rauwolfia problem]. Hippokrates. 1958;29(10):315-9. PubMed PMID: 13548843
  6. Weiss RF. [Newer research results in the field of phytotherapy]. Hippokrates. 1959;30(1):32-7. PubMed PMID: 13630469
  7. Weiss RF. [Medicinal plants in health care (phyto-prevention)]. Hippokrates. 1960;31:572-5. PubMed PMID: 13784094
  8. Weiss RF. [Antitussive teas and other antitussive plant drugs]. Hippokrates. 1961;32:14-8. PubMed PMID: 13784093
  9. Weiss RF. [Results of recent phytotherapeutic research]. Hippokrates. 1962;33:899-901. PubMed PMID: 13999733
  10. Weiss RF. [The mechanism of action of Crataegus oxycantha]. Hippokrates. 1963;34:602-5. PubMed PMID: 14046338
  11. Weiß R. Die Amara in der heutigen Therapie [Bitters in current therapy]. Planta Med. 1966;14(S 01):128-32. DOI: 10.1055/s-0028-1100090
  12. Weiss RF. [Phytotherapy - today]. Hippokrates. 1975;46(2):143-57. PubMed PMID: 1213908
  13. Keller K. Legal requirements for the use of phytopharmaceutical drugs in the Federal Republic of Germany. J Ethnopharmacol. 1991;32(1-3):225-9. PubMed PMID: 1881161
  14. Locher C, Pforr C. The legacy of Sebastian Kneipp: linking wellness, naturopathic, and allopathic medicine. J Altern Complement Med. 2014;20(7):521-6. PubMed PMID: 24773138
  15. Erinnerung an Professor R. F. Weiß – Altmeister der modernen Phytotherapie. Z Phytother. 2020;41(04):191-192. DOI: 10.1055/a-1126-9219

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. Weiss RF in Hippokrates
  2. History of phytotherapy in Germany
  3. Deficiency diseases in prisoners of war
  4. Commission E monographs

Further Reading

Back to Table of Contents

Connections